


A Few of My Favorite Things

by nightbloomingcereus



Series: Dreaming Spires (the Oxford-verse) [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Enemies to Lovers, Established Relationship, F/M, Ineffable Bureaucracy (Good Omens), Semi-Public Sex, The Sound of Music - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 12:36:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21036341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightbloomingcereus/pseuds/nightbloomingcereus
Summary: Their names are like knives in each other's mouths. There is a particular thrill in calling each other by their last names in bed: Morningstar and Arcangel, hereditary enemies, opposite sides of a feud drenched in old, old animosities.A look into the complicated relationship between Gabriel Arcangel and Bee Morningstar.  Human AU, spin-off ofPart of the Whole Design.





	A Few of My Favorite Things

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a spin-off of my human AU, [Part of the Whole Design](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20264692/chapters/48032812), and focuses on Gabriel and Bee. Aziraphale and Crowley are not in it, although they are briefly mentioned. Chronologically, it takes place after PotWD. 
> 
> If you're just here for the Ineffable Bureaucracy, I think you can probably read this on its own, although you'll miss out on a lot of the backstory for these characters, which is in PotWD.

Gabriel Arcangel slides into his seat just as the lights dim and the curtain goes up on the latest revival of _The Sound of Music _in London's West End. He's singing along to the musical numbers and thoroughly enjoying himself when someone slips into the empty seat next to his, the one that was supposed to have been Michael's, before she had gotten called away for a last-minute consultation by a particularly needy client. (His sister has always placed business before pleasure. Gabriel himself, despite appearances, might not have necessarily made the same decision; _The Sound of Music _is his favorite, after all, and has been since he was a child.)

He smells dark rose and musk. The fragrance is a distinctive, custom-blended perfume: one-of-a-kind, quite expensive, and very, very familiar. 

A velvet voice whispers in his ear, sing-song, mocking, "These are a few of my favorite things…" Her breath is warm where it ghosts across his neck, and her lips just barely brush his earlobe when she speaks, a shivery feeling that is half fearful and half pleasurable (or, perhaps more accurately, half fear and _all _pleasure).

She's sitting very close, her arm pressed against his over the shared armrest, even though she is tiny and the seats are spacious. Her hand brazenly drops over into his personal space, drifting toward his lap, the tips of her fingers brushing against the zipper of his trousers. Blood rushes to his face, and to other parts of his body, and he is glad for the darkness of the theater. She twists her wrist. He reaches behind him with one hand, slightly awkwardly, to grab his coat from the back of his seat, and drops it over his lap. 

He doesn't ask how she had known that he would be here. It's what they do, after all. A constant running survey of each other's whereabouts, the challenge of finding the most unexpected time and place to surprise each other, the thrill of the unpredictable. She's like a humming, buzzing presence always in the back of his brain. He can't turn it off even in his sleep. He probably wouldn't be able to sleep if it wasn't there. He hopes it's the same for her. They don't _communicate_, not in ways that therapists would call _healthy _at least, not about dates or times or places or _making plans._ And yet, they don't really need to. At this point it's second nature; he knows her better than anyone else alive and yet she still manages to surprise him sometimes. He is disciplined, she is impulsive, and together they are something explosive and exhilarating.

"I hate you," he growls under his breath, looking very deliberately forward, at the stage, where the nuns are singing "Maria".

"I know," she hisses back, her breath hot against his ear, her teeth grazing his earlobe.

* * *

His name is carved on a tasteful but conspicuous plaque at the front of the theater (_Gabriel and Michael Arcangel, platinum circle donors_). Hers, to his immense satisfaction, is not (although it is on a different, rival one down the street). In any case, dropping his name and flashing his million-watt Harvard-Business-School-honed smile gets him backstage access at the intermission, and then it's easy enough to find an unoccupied dressing room. Such are the miracles wrought by money and power.

They don't bother to lock the door. They're impatient, and they both enjoy the illicit thrill at the thought that someone could walk right in. There are various arrangements of mirrors and rows of bright, round vanity lights set into the walls of the room; he catches sight of fragments of their bodies, as they're tearing each other's clothes off, reflected at odd angles in multiple mirrors. It's part creepy, fun-house grotesque and part pornographic, exhibitionist fantasy and exactly what they both want right now. She has him pressed up against one of the vanity tables, his trousers already down around his knees. She taps the surface of the table with a fingernail, says, "Up."

He complies and hops up onto the table, which wobbles a little, the cold mirror tilting unsteadily against his back. The slight tipping of the table and the mirror, the heady scent of her perfume, the bright bulbs, and the frantic illicitness of it all, make him feel reckless and wild and alive. He reaches over, places his hands on either side of her waist, and picks her up easily, eliciting a small gasp of surprise, both pleased and irritated. He drops her in his lap, facing him, and then she's wriggling down on top of him, her feet, still in their heavy, steel-toed brogues, kicking up, sending lipstick tubes and bottles and hairbrushes flying.

* * *

They're late back to their seats, but the ushers let them stroll right in even though the curtain is already up and the actors belting out a musical number on the stage. The other patrons grimace a little as they stumble past them, still a little dazed by heat and bright lights and mirrors and the smell of black roses, but don't say anything. He knows he's flushed and out of breath, but, if anyone asks, he's finding this show to be a _very _enjoyable production. 

_The Sound of Music _really is an excellent show. Rousing musical numbers, singing nuns, the rising tension in the first half, an altogether satisfying conclusion. A few of his favorite things, indeed. He's really looking forward to seeing it again. 

* * *

"You," he says much later, coming up for air, "are an absolute demon." 

"Not just any old run-of-the-mill demon. I'd be a Prince of Hell. At least."

Bee raises her head to look at him, from where she's lying on top of his chest, naked except for a pair of black fishnet ankle socks, a look that he thinks he would find an absurd combination of sexy and ridiculous on anyone else, but, on her, it's just sexy. Her wild hair is even more uncontrollable than ever; it's in his mouth, and probably elsewhere too. Gabriel himself has also somehow ended up wearing her red silk sash, which is stretched tight over his much broader chest, and not much else, which, some distant, tiny, rational part of his brain that sounds like Michael tells him, probably also looks ridiculous. The currently much larger and more vocal part of his mind doesn't give a single fuck. 

He looks back at her, violet eyes trained on her black ones, and says, "You've got a high opinion of yourself, Morningstar."

"You know I'm right," she retorts. She looks pointedly at his neck and the several red marks blooming there, and licks her lips. "Besides, we both know you wouldn't be consorting with anyone less than the Prince of Hell. Nothing but the best for you, Arcangel."

Their names are like knives in each other's mouths. There is a particular thrill in calling each other by their last names in bed: _Morningstar _and _Arcangel_, hereditary enemies, opposite sides of a feud drenched in old, old animosities. They are connected by something that is at once magnetic and antagonistic. You couldn't breathe for it sometimes, and it is both exhilarating and terrifying. They reach for each other at the same time, and their mouths collide wildly in an aggressive kiss, both struggling for dominance, like they're trying to cut each other with their tongues. She tastes like the Lagavulin that's sitting on the bedside table, dark and smoky and complex. He wraps an arm around her narrow shoulders and hooks his ankles around hers so that he's holding her down despite being beneath her. She runs her hands through his hair, pulling hard, and lets her fingernails draw scratches down his neck. When they break apart, breathing hard, her lower lip catches for a moment between his teeth.

They're in the penthouse suite at the Langham, which had happened to be the closest 5-star hotel to the theater (he does still have his standards after all, and so does she). He'd checked in under the name "William Golding," as he always does at luxury hotels all over London and sometimes other cities, and gone up to the penthouse immediately. She'd waited five minutes (it should have been longer, but neither of them were feeling particularly patient at the moment) before casually strolling in from the other entrance, heading straight for the elevators and the door she knew would be left unlocked for her. 

Nights like these always end in one of three ways. He slips out well before dawn, trying not to wake her, in part because he likes to look at her sleep-softened mouth and the black eyelashes closed against her makeup-smudged cheek, although that is a tenderness that neither of them would ever admit to. He's never quite sure if she's really asleep, or just pretending to be. He makes a brief stop at home to change his clothes, and then spends an hour or two running as hard as he can along the banks of the Thames, sucking in lungfuls of still night-cold air and sweating the scent of her out of his skin, as the sun rises. The paparazzi have snapped photos of him doing this more than once: _Gabriel Arcangel, early to bed, early to rise, always running alone at the crack of dawn. Discipline and asceticism._

Or she'll leave sometime around three a.m., while he pretends to be asleep, to spend the rest of the night dancing at some exclusive underground club. The photographers have caught her at it too, heading back to her townhouse at dawn with dark mascara circles under her eyes, smelling of smoke and sweat and lust, still graceful even in her debauchery, also always alone: _Bee Morningstar, partying all night, no sleep for the wicked. Chaos and hedonism._

Or, most rarely of all, they'll both stay, sleeping for real through the dawn, the morning-after kisses deep and languid and almost, _almost_ tender, and somehow more dangerous, more transgressive, than anything else from the night before. Those mornings, they chase ink-dark room service espresso with the last of the previous night's Scotch and a tray of enormous, sticky, sugared doughnuts from that one shop clear on the other side of town that always has a line around the block no matter how early you go. (He still has no idea how she always manages to get those damn doughnuts, no matter where in London they happen to be. Once she'd even somehow gotten them sent to a hotel in Manchester. If pressed, he might guess that her assistant, an overly enthusiastic young man named Eric who is preternaturally good at multitasking, might be spending a lot of time standing in doughnut-shop lines.) He grumbles about sullying the temple of his body, then steals bites when she isn't looking. (But she knows. Of course she knows.) They really are sinfully good. He figures the temple of _her _body is perfectly fine, pretty much perfect in fact, so what's the harm, really? 

Each one of these things is, in its own way, both a penance and a worship. 

Neither of them would ever ask the other to stay. 

He's not really sure how it began between the two of them, who started it, or how it has become what it is now. Perhaps it was just the inevitable conclusion of a lifetime spent in the same social circles, where they'd snipe at each other from within the spheres of _Morningstar _and _Arcangel_. Even when they'd been only teenagers, their orbits had been constantly colliding, from London to Boston to St. Moritz. 

He'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a trust fund bigger than most people's dreams. She'd been born with nothing, an immigrant's child, a servant's child, and yet she'd grabbed that silver spoon right out of the mouths of people who didn't deserve it half as much as she did. He had made the mistake of saying something demeaning about her beginnings once a long time ago, and only once. He'd meant to wound, if only in the skin-deep way they always threw barbs at each other, but she hadn't flared up in hot, red anger the way he'd expected, the way she usually did in this game they were playing. No, she'd gone _cold_, icy and silent, and hadn't spoken to him for weeks. No biting remarks, no angry retorts, no suggestive whispers. He'd kept looking over his shoulder and finding nothing, nobody, there. The silence had been maddening, and miserable. He thinks about things like his white male privilege now. He wonders if she knows that she's inadvertently made him a _better person_. He's not going to tell her. She'd probably hate it if she knew.

Now that they're the de facto heads of their respective companies, they're still dancing the same dance. They're still sniping at each other, trying to undermine each other, sending spies and operatives in to each other's offices, trading in each other's secrets, stealing clients from under each other's noses. Power comes with its benefits: covert back channel meetings, information trades, top-secret corporate connections; these things can _of course _only be handled by the top executives of each company. 

They are still finding ways to surprise one another, even right in the heart of enemy territory. He'd found her sitting on the third-floor fire escape of Michael's townhouse once, during an interminable dinner party with some horrendously dull American investors. She'd found him lounging on her balcony in nothing but a pair of sunglasses, one room over from Lucifer's, during the Morningstar Corporation's executive retreat in Lake Como. 

They engage in overt and very public displays of rivalry, and what appears to almost everyone else to be bitter feuding. Nobody thinks it odd that they are more often than not seen in the same place; everyone knows, after all, that the Arcangels and the Morningstars keep constant, jealous eyes on one another. _Doing your own thing _matters less than _doing the same thing, better_. 

She'd thrown a drink in his face once, glass and all, at a benefit dinner. It had been all over the tabloids and the Internet the next morning: Gabriel Arcangel with red wine dripping down his face like bloody tears, the heavy crystal goblet bouncing off his cheekbone and shattering on the marble floor, and a cold, fierce glare in his violet eyes; Bee Morningstar in her incandescent and unpredictable rage, passionate hatred in her black eyes. What nobody else knew was that she'd _licked _that red wine off his cheek five minutes later in the coatroom. What nobody else knew was that he'd been secretly pleased by the spectacular bruise that had bloomed, bold and livid, Bordeaux dark, across his face for the next week. 

What was the old cliché? Enemies to friends to lovers, only skip the friends part entirely and make it enemies to … something. The very first time, he'll admit, it had just been hate sex more than anything else, but it had also been the best sex that he'd ever had. And it had rapidly, so rapidly that he hadn't even realized it was happening, become something else entirely, something with much higher stakes and far greater reward. It was all such a game, and such a thrill. So thin the line between aggression and passion, animosity and intimacy. Everything diamond-edged, designed to draw blood, and so, so clearly in focus. 

(There are words they don't use. Theirs is a relationship, although that is also a word they never say, built on a deep mutual animosity, after all. They don't talk about it. It's just how these things go. They've fucked in hotel rooms all over London, in a dozen more cities all over the world, but never in his bed, or in hers.)

Gabriel Arcangel doesn't date. His name and his perfectly chiseled face routinely make it onto lists of London's Hottest Bachelors and Most Eligible Men in the UK and the like, and every year this invites speculation about his perpetual singlehood and who or what he might be waiting for. Some attribute it to his religious, church-going upbringing, or to his own apparent penchant for self-discipline. They say he's married to his work. The more romantic among the gossipers think he's saving himself for the perfect woman (or man). And what is he going to say? That everyone thinks he wants _raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens_, and that's so far from the truth that it's hilariously funny? That his ideal partner is a lethal combination of bedroom and boardroom? That everyone thinks he's looking for milky tea when all he wants is dark, smoky, peaty Scotch? That he's in so deep, drowned in a sea of broken glass edges, that he doesn't remember what the shoreline looks like? He doesn't remember what it feels like to be _unattached_, the way everyone thinks he is. 

There is rampant speculation about Bee Morningstar's love life as well, although she too has never been definitively linked to a partner. Bee is the kind of contradictory enigma that Internet celebrity gossip forums love to go insane over. For one thing, despite the excesses (her crazy fashion choices, the wild all-night raves, the flashes of temper that lead her to do things like throw drinks in people's faces) that make her seem like a wild child, albeit one that is past forty, she is also an absolutely accomplished and powerful businesswoman who runs her adopted father's multi-billion dollar international corporation with a brilliant and ruthless hand. You underestimated Bee Morningstar or discounted her as a loose cannon at your own peril, and you never did it twice, assuming you survived the first attempt. This dichotomy has led many to conclude that she must go through men and women like disposable playthings; they say that she must be inordinately good at keeping her sexual exploits under wraps and must somehow be keeping all of her conquests from talking as well. They are right about one thing, although they are wrong about everything else: she's very good at keeping her love life secret, and of course her singular and long-time conquest has his own very good reasons for doing so.

When she looks at him, it's as if all the unnecessary parts of him have been pared away, all the artifice planed off, leaving only what is essential, what is real, what is vital and purely distilled. The sharpened edge of want and the softer but no less lethal point of need.

"So," he says, "Nigel Metatron called me today and told me something _very_ interesting. Apparently Grandmother got a wedding invitation in the mail last week."

"Oh?" Bee arches an eyebrow, fixes him with a stare. There's dark makeup smudged all around her eyes. (It's probably somewhere on his body too.)

"Our dear_, dear _cousins, it seems, are getting married. A garden wedding. In the springtime."

"Well, well, well. Your stubborn little angel and our difficult little demon. How cute," she sneers. 

"She's not going to go, of course. She's not gone anywhere for years. None of the rest of us even got invitations."

"I don't think any of us did either. In any case, I'm sure they've invited Adam Young, and Lucifer isn't allowed to get within a hundred meters of the boy after what happened last year. Neither are Hastur and Ligur."

"What do they see in each other? They're complete opposites. What do they even have in common?" he grumbles.

She doesn't answer this question, and instead says, "I hear Oxford is lovely in May."

"Are you afraid?" he asks. It's both an honest concern and a challenge. Aziraphale and Crowley are, as far as he knows, the only people in the world who have figured out that they are more than just bitter enemies; they also, more disturbingly, somehow seem to have twigged on to the deeper currents between Bee and himself, the things that they won't say out loud. 

"Of their little threats? No. Are you?"

"Of course not. They don't scare me."

She plants both palms on his chest, levers herself up so she's hovering over him and he's taking all her weight. She looks down at him, her hair falling in her eyes, and bares her teeth in a savage grin. "Well, Gabriel _fucking _Arcangel, I think you and I have a wedding to crash."

_This is new_, he thinks. They've never made plans for future meetings before. 

His answering smile is a match for hers, wild and reckless and full of teeth. 

He'll stay through the morning this time. So will she. 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first draft of this while I was working on PotWD, as an exercise to better understand Gabriel and Bee and their motivations. It came out both way hotter and way more tender than I expected. I'm kind of in love with Bee in this universe now.


End file.
